A Good Age: Catching up with baseball pioneer Mary Pratt at 94

Those watching the World Series include Quincy’s Mary Pratt, who turns 95 on Nov. 30. Pratt, a pitcher, played in the All-American Girls Baseball League in the 1940s. She has fought to have more women involved in sports for more than 40 years.

I hadn’t spoken to her since the mid-1990s, so I called her and left a message.

I didn’t get a call back and decided not to pester her. Then, last Friday, I was sitting in the office when an editor told me a woman was here to see me.

It was Mary Pratt, as outspoken, feisty and energetic as ever. She turns 95 on Nov. 30. She had driven over to track me down after her return call didn’t go through.

We sat down. I pulled out some of the Ledger’s photos of her from the past. At 94, she said, she still works out three times a week and recently returned from a baseball-related event in Chicago. She attends gatherings of the Retired Quincy Teachers Association and keeps busy.

Of course she’s been following the Red Sox. She clearly is not enamored of their beards and is put off by the much more revealing clothes women in sports wear these days. She does come from a different era; she and her teammates were instructed in charm, proper decorum and posture by cosmetics queen Helena Rubinstein.

From 1943 to 1947, when the regular players were off fighting in World War II, Pratt spent five summers pitching for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. The games, featured in the 1992 movie ”A League of Their Own,” drew 7,000 fans a night at their peak.

Pratt was a southpaw who joined the league after playing for the Olympettes, a women’s amateur team, at Boston Garden. She had developed an effective “windmill” or “sling slot”-style pitch. Her best year was 1944; she won 21 games and lost 15, and counts a no-hitter among her victories. In her day, she helped prove that women could play a fast, aggressive game worth watching. She was paid $60 a week.

I first wrote about her in 1987, then several times again in the 1990s. A 1948 headline in The Patriot Ledger hailed her as “South Shore’s Zaharias” after Babe Zaharias, the famous female athlete.

She retired from the Quincy school system in 1986, after 42 years as phys ed teacher, coach and referee. Her main purpose since then has been to get more woman involved in sports. Sports have been her life, and she has fought for women as coaches and referees, organized workshops for advancing women in sports, and spoken at local schools and to community groups. Her contributions continue.

Page 2 of 2 - She has been inducted into the Boston Garden Hall of Fame and the Boston University Hall of Fame and honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

When we were leaving the Ledger office, we met two young people in the elevator and she struck up a conversation, challenging their views. They were intrigued. She sang the song the Rockford Peaches used to sing as they walked to the train in Chicago in the 1940s.